by Lisa Ladew
“Is he your boyfriend?”
Jessica shook her head and said “No” in a small voice.
“Is he your pimp?”
Jessica didn’t say anything. Her oval face was a perfect blank mask but two pregnant tears spilled onto her cheeks and made dirty tracks to her chin.
“Jessica, where do you and Zoey sleep at night?”
Jessica sat still and silent.
“I want to get you a hotel room for tonight, OK?”
Jessica’s eyes went wide, even though she was still staring at the ground. She shook her head. “Oh no, Manny wouldn’t like that.”
“Manny doesn’t have to know,” Sara said gently.
“He’ll know. He’ll be back here tonight to see how much money I have.”
“We can make sure you are here at 8, and I’ll give you money to give to him. I just want you and Zoey to get out of this heat for a bit, and sleep in a soft, safe bed tonight. And if you don’t come back at 8, I’ll fix it with Manny.”
Jessica considered, biting her lip. She kept giving Zoey little squirts of water, and Zoey was starting to look sleepy again. She turned suddenly to Sara. “Why?”
Sara looked her in the eye and didn’t hesitate for a second. “Because you deserve better than to sit on a filthy street and try to rock your baby to sleep while you collect money for some man who is just going to beat you and not even let you keep enough for a decent meal. Because I’ve worked with a lot of women just like you and I know what you’ve been through. And I know how to help you. And I know how to get Manny off your back.”
Jessica grimaced. When she spoke, Sara had to strain to hear her. “You can’t help me. No one can help me. Manny said he’d kill me if I took off on him. He said he’d follow me to California, to New York even. He said if I ever took off, he’d, he’d…” Jessica burst into tears and hugged baby Zoey tightly to her chest. Zoey had been almost asleep again, but let out an indignant squawk at this treatment, then started crying again.
Sara got more water in the straw and held it out to Jessica. “He’d do something to Zoey?” she asked gently.
Jessica nodded savagely, ignoring the straw. She pushed herself up to standing with one hand and walked down the sidewalk, in a swaying, bouncing walk meant to soothe the baby. Sara waited for her to return.
When she did, Sara said “What if I could promise you that Manny would never hurt you again? That you’d never see him again. That I would help you get a place to live or go somewhere else if that’s what you wanted to do.”
Jessica looked at her wildly, with something like hope in her eyes. It looked unnatural there.
Sara nodded. “Let’s get out of this heat. And then we can figure it out. I promise.”
Sara took her to the Las Vegas West Hotel. She would have liked for Jessica to have been a little closer to her hotel, but this was an inexpensive one where Jessica wouldn’t raise as many eyebrows.
She got Jessica and the now-sleeping Zoey a room for one week, ignoring the hotel clerk’s snobby glances at Jessica. She put the room in her new Brook name, but paid cash for it. While she was waiting for 2 keys, she realized she hadn’t thought about Jerry in hours. And then she realized she was thinking about Jerry and mentally kicked herself.
When they got to the room, the first thing Jessica did was turn up the air conditioning to high, kick off her shoes, gently lay baby Zoey down on the bed, and then lay down next to her, a smile lighting up her face. Sara was glad, since it meant she’d been in a hotel before. Sara figured Jessica was probably ready to sleep for a few days, but she had to ask some questions first.
She pulled the chair over next to the bed. “Jessica, how old are you?”
“16.” Jessica opened her eyes, giving Sara a cautious, wide-eyed look.
“Did you run away from home?”
“Yes.”
“Would you go back if you could?”
“No way,” Jessica whispered.
Sara nodded, just to show it was OK. Home life was as bad as Manny then. Worse probably. She switched subjects. “If you tried to get a job, is there anyone who could watch Zoey for you?”
“Oh yeah, my best friend Amanda. She has a baby too. She works Ceasar’s.”
“For Manny?”
Jessica nodded.
“Does Manny have a lot of girls?”
“Yeah, I don’t know how many, but he’s got a house that 7 or so sleep at.”
“Do you sleep there?”
“Sometimes, if I don’t have anywhere else to sleep. But I don’t like to because a couple of the girls are dangerous. One night while I was still pregnant I woke up being choked by a girl who didn’t like me.”
“Do any of the rest of Manny’s girls want to get away from him?”
“Amanda does, and Julie does. And yeah, there’s more. Julie actually tried to go home and Manny found her at the bus station. He beat her up and cut her face.”
Jessica’s lip quivered and she scooted closer to baby Zoey.
Sara nodded. “Where can I find Manny right now?”
Jessica looked at the clock. “He’s probably making rounds. He could be anywhere. But he’ll be at his house tonight.” Jessica gave her the address. “What are you going to do? Are you going to mention me?” she asked in a small voice.
“I’m not going to mention you, don’t worry. I’m just going to convince him that he’d be better off in another line of work.”
Jessica looked doubtful. She nodded, then smoothed baby Zoey’s hair and laid her head down on the pillow.
Sara got up. “Jessica, I have a ton of things to do. I’m going to leave you a key, but you can’t go out of the room OK? First thing, I’m going to go and get you some food, and then I have to go back to my own hotel for a little bit, and tomorrow or the next day I’m going to come and see you and we can talk a bit about your new life. For now, you stay right here and don’t go anywhere.”
Jessica nodded. “I’m just going to sleep, Brook. Thank you so much.”
“One more thing Jessica,” Sara opened her purse and got out two bills. Here’s $200. I’m giving it to you in case you don’t hear from me again for a few days. I’m planning on coming soon, but just in case. If you need to, order some food, but don’t leave the room, OK?”
Jessica’s eyes went wide again. She watched the two hundreds move from Sara’s hand to the dresser and nodded slowly.
Sara thought leaving the key and leaving money were unavoidable. She would take care of Manny tonight or tomorrow night, no matter what. He was too dangerous to leave any longer than that. But you never knew what else could happen in two days. She didn’t want to leave Jessica and the baby without any options. Plus, if Jessica took the money and took off, Sara would know that she wasn’t ready to be helped. And then all she could do would be get rid of Manny and pray to whatever God would still listen that Jessica found help at some point. She didn’t think Jessica would take off though. She didn’t have any needle marks and she wasn’t high and she wasn’t jonesing, that was obvious. She cared enough about the baby to stay away from drugs, as hard as that probably was in her current circumstances. To Sara, all signs pointed to a person who was ready and willing to do whatever it took to get off the streets and in charge of her own life. Becoming a mother oftentimes did that to girls. It turned them into women.
Sara left the room. She went to the store in the lobby and filled three bags with enough junk food to make Jessica very happy and possibly very sick if she ate it all at once. She returned to the room and slipped the bags quietly inside the door of the dark and quiet room. Then she ran quickly to the street to catch a cab. Guaranteed she had missed all of her deliveries. She just hoped the delivery people had the sense to leave them at the front desk.
Back at her hotel, she asked at the front desk for any packages. Everything was there, piled up on a cart. She took it all to the room, peeled off a few outfits out of the clothes for Jessica, then began work setting up the computer and monitors. This was
an integral part of her stay here, and she hoped she hadn’t already waited too long.
She pushed together several desks in the apartment’s cavernous main room and set up an array, with all the monitors next to each other and slightly canted in towards the chair. Then she started downloading software she needed from a private cloud. She put programs on line one by one as they became available. At the end of 2 hours, she had hacked into the hotel’s security cameras on the street, and the security cameras of the 4 closest casinos. Her 5 monitors were all divided into 4 pictures each, showing the pictures that the security cameras were seeing. Her face recognition software was scanning each picture for full or partial matches of 12 pictures.
She sat and thought long and hard about if she needed to add 3 more pictures. In the end, she did, pulling Jerry’s, Hawk’s, and Craig’s pictures off of her private cloud.
If any of these 15 people came within a mile of her, she would know in an instant. She set the alerts up to forward to her phone, then sat down on the bed to decide what kind of a fate was going to befall Manny. Would she give him a chance? Or were his days on this earth now to be measured in minutes? Why start giving chances now? she thought. Because you want to be different, another part of her mind argued. Yeah, I’ll be different, but only when someone deserves it. Pimps never deserve it.
Sara changed her clothes, grabbed her bag, checked her phone, and headed out the door for surveillance. If she got a chance to take Manny out this evening, it would have to be quick and dirty with two shots to the head and one to the chest. Otherwise, she’d get equipped tomorrow and do it right.
Chapter 8
Emma pulled into the Mariana Day apartments and dropped Jerry off, then followed him to his place.
To Jerry, it felt good to walk into his house. Tiredness dropped onto his shoulders like a lead coat as soon as his feet crossed the threshold. His body was insisting that he sleep. But there was business first, wasn’t there?
Jerry went to his fridge and shared out three beers. As he dropped onto the couch Emma turned to him expectantly.
Jerry put up his hands, as if to ward off her gaze. “I know, I know, you can’t believe I never told you I’d been arrested before.”
“Well yeah, I can’t.”
“It’s not something I like to think about,” Jerry mumbled.
“Emma, what have I told you about my parents?” Jerry asked quickly.
Emma thought. “Just that your mom died when you were 14 and your dad died when you were 20. You never liked to talk about them.”
Jerry took a long swallow of beer, then nodded. “My mom didn’t die when I was 14, she took off.”
“Oh Jerry, I’m sorry!” Emma said, touching his hand. Craig took a drink of his beer and looked on impassively.
Jerry held up a hand. It seemed like Emma thought his mom taking off was worse than her dying. And he did too, didn’t he? Otherwise why would he have lied about it? “It’s OK. It doesn’t bother me much anymore, but I still don’t like to talk about it. To this day I don’t know where she is or where she went and most days I feel like I’m OK with that. I have to tell you that part though, for you to understand the rest of it. So do you want the long version, or the short version?”
Emma looked at Craig, and then back at Jerry. “Whatever you feel comfortable sharing, Jerry.”
Jerry opened his mouth, preparing to tell the short version, but then he surprised himself.
“When I was 6, my dad was in a car accident. He was T-boned by a stupid kid in an unsafe intersection on his way to work. He had a head injury. It didn’t seem to be too bad at first. He went back to work and all, but he had headaches. And then when I was 7 or 8 he got dementia. He started to forget things, like how to get to work. And then he stopped being able to drive a car.”
Emma’s face contorted with dismay and Jerry had to look away from her. He examined the carpet near his couch, found nothing exciting, and pushed on.
“Eventually it got so bad that he would sit in a chair all day long and not even get up to go to the bathroom or get himself food. My mother became his caregiver. She was very strong for a long time. Physically and emotionally strong. But when I was 14, she left for work one day and just didn’t come home. I talked to her friends at work and she had been seeing another man for about a year. One friend knew the guys name and where he lived so I took the bus and went to see the boyfriend, and he had run out on his rent and taken off at the same time as my mom. I never heard another thing from her.
No one really knew how bad things were in my house. We didn’t have the money to take my dad to a doctor or have someone come in to take care of him. So I did it. He got a disability check every month and that’s what we lived on. I just didn’t go back to school and instead I stayed home, taking care of my dad. I figured out how to pay the bills, I forged his signature and everything. We lived like that for 2 years. I kept hoping my mom would come home. But one day I woke up and I knew she wasn’t going to. I knew that was it. This was my life now. After that day I thought long and hard about calling someone. The police, the hospital, someone. But I was scared. Where would I go if they came and took him and put him in a home? Into foster care? Into an orphanage? We didn’t have any family close by. None that I had ever met. So I didn’t call anyone. But I did start leaving the house during the day. I would just walk and walk for miles.”
Emma interrupted him. “Jerry, what about your sister?”
“She’s my half-sister. Mom and dad split up for a bit just before the accident. Dad managed to get his ex-girlfriend pregnant. She never lived at our house. I didn’t really connect with her till we were adults.” Jerry wondered at the shame he felt while he told Emma this. Was he ashamed of his father? Or at himself? Didn’t he have enough going on already? He didn’t need to feel bad about this too. He marked it as inconsequential and kept talking.
“I was tall already and probably could pass for older than 16, so I never got any flack from the cops for truancy. But then I met Rodney. He was a gang member but I didn’t know it at the time. Emotionally and socially, I think my growth had kind of stalled when my mom left. So I was a 14 year old in a 16 year olds body. And I thought Rodney was fascinating. He was strong and cool and he didn’t take any shit from anyone. And I owed him from day one. The day I met him, I was walking to the grocery store to buy groceries, and a gang of teenagers started picking on me for no reason. They were walking behind me stepping on the backs of my shoes and laughing when my foot came out. There were 6 or 7 of them and I was getting scared. There were businesses and cars on the street but I still didn’t know if anyone would help me if they just knocked me down and beat me up. That kind of thing happens quickly. When I had been in school it happened all the time. After I got rolled twice I learned to never walk anywhere by myself.
So Rodney is just coming out of a shop and he sees what they are doing to me and he gets between me and them and calls them out on it. I thought that was crazy. He was just one guy, and there were 6 of them. So one guy shoves him, and he pulls out a gun and points it at him. They scattered. Rodney put it back under his shirt like nothing had happened and asked if I was OK. And from that moment on I did anything Rodney wanted. I don’t like to think about that time, and I really don’t want to talk about it, but I will say that I almost ended up in Rodney’s gang. I got arrested only the one time. For assault. That was initiation into the gang - you had to assault a rival gang member.
The guy I assaulted almost died. I hit him over the head with a steel bar from behind and when he fell on the ground I kicked him in the head three times. He started seizing. He hadn’t said a word or made a noise. He probably never even knew what happened. I remember standing over him and thinking he was going to die and never feeling so helpless in all my life. Rodney had sent me out to do it myself. I was supposed to jump the guy and beat him and once he was unconscious or dead I was supposed to run. But I didn’t run. I stayed, even when I heard the sirens. When his eyes rolled back in his
head I sat down on the ground and rocked him and screamed I was sorry, like my apology would make him stop shaking. I remember thinking I should stick something in his mouth so he wouldn’t swallow his tongue and then thinking no I shouldn’t because that was stupid and just wishing the ground would open up and swallow me whole, even if it meant I was going to hell. I told God or the devil, whichever one would do it, to take my life and give it to that kid.”
Jerry almost whispered the last sentence. He’d never told anyone this story. In fact, when his sentencing was over he purposely never even thought about it again. Thinking about it hurt. Speaking it out loud, he was discovering, was agony. He saw Emma try to stand up, try to come to him. Craig took her hand and pulled her gently back. Good. He didn’t want to be comforted right now. He wasn’t done.
“So when the cops got there they put me in handcuffs. I watched the Paramedics take care of the kid. I still felt like I wanted to die, but I also remember thinking that I wanted to be one of those ambulance guys. They came in and fixed whatever could be fixed. They were heroes. I decided right there, that if my life were to go on, I’d have to be a hero, not a villain.”
Emma nodded as Jerry talked. That part made total sense to her.
“The cops processed me and then took me to a juvenile holding facility. Basically a jail for boys. I had to tell them about my dad so someone would go take care of him. They put him in a state facility that night. Kind of a jail for old people, except he wasn’t old.
I didn’t have anyone to call and I didn’t have anywhere to go, and so I stayed right in Straw Blossom - is that a stupid fucking name for a juvenile detention center or what? - for a month, until my sentencing. I was terrified. The word in the facility was assault as a gang member or initiation into a gang was the hot new crime to crack down on. The other boys were telling me that it almost always got charged as an adult, and it usually carried a 2 year minimum sentence. One red-headed boy nicknamed Rock who had Tourettes’s syndrome told me his brother had gotten 15 years, no chance of parole, for assault that ended up with the victim dying 2 weeks later. And his brother was only 15. I didn’t know if I should believe any of it, but I did.